Stars
Symbol Analysis

Christopher often looks up at the stars, especially in emotionally difficult situations. The stars make him feel small because the universe is so large, and they allow him to imagine that he’s out in space and there aren’t people all around him, which he finds comforting. The stars represent the fact that everything is much bigger than humankind and the social rules that fail Christopher—he remarks that humans will probably be extinct by the time the universe stops exploding from the Big Bang and all of the stars fall back towards each other. He also rejects the idea of constellations by saying they’re entirely arbitrary, thus stripping the stars of the stories that people have laid over them to make them more understandable to human minds. Christopher’s mind works in a different way. Furthermore, the stars symbolize his desire to be an astronaut and achieve everything that people have told him he can’t do.

Stars Quotes in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time quotes below all refer to the symbol of Stars. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

).
Note: all page and citation info for the quotes below refers to the Vintage edition of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time published in 2004.

Chapter 173
Quotes

People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow...

But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur...

And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don’t know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away.

And that is the truth.

Related Characters:Christopher John Francis Boone (speaker)

Related Symbols:Stars

Related Themes:

Page Number and Citation:
125

Explanation and Analysis:

Christopher makes these remarks about the stars while hiding behind the garden shed after his father confesses that he killed Wellington. Christopher often looks up at the night sky, and it makes him feel both small and situated within the universe. Constellations, as he points out, are stories that humans create with the stars, and do not have any scientific basis. They help humans feel that they have some control over or relationship to these distant celestial bodies. However, as he often does, Christopher dismantles this human construction, pointing out that the constellations are entirely arbitrary and rather absurd. He prefers to regard the stars as what they truly are: chemical reactions that are entirely removed from the workings of humanity.

Coming directly after Christopher finds out that his mother is alive and his father killed Wellington, this passage gestures to the sense of isolation and powerlessness that Christopher is feeling. Furthermore, it acts as a grounding mechanism for him; as he suddenly feels he has to reconstruct the narratives of his own life and past, he strips away the myths that people raise around the stars, reducing them to the hard, simple truth that makes him feel stable.

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Stars Symbol Timeline in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The timeline below shows where the symbol Stars appears in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

Chapter 17

...car, and as they drive to the station, he looks out the window at the stars.
(full context)

...the scientists who discovered that the sky is dark at night despite the billions of stars because the universe is expanding from the Big Bang. Eventually, the universe will stop expanding,...
(full context)

Chapter 173

...Supposedly Orion looks like a hunter with his weapons, but Christopher points out that the stars could be joined up to make any figure someone wanted. Constellations are completely subjective, based...
(full context)

Chapter 179

...allow him to see a map of the sky, so that he can tell which stars he’s looking at. When he does this he feels small, because the universe is so...
(full context)

Chapter 233

That night, Christopher looks for the stars, but there are too many clouds and too much light pollution. He can’t sleep, so...
(full context)

...house. Christopher is frightened, so he lies out in the yard and looks at the stars. Ed comes outside, watches Christopher, and punches the fence.
(full context)